Join this conversation as Dusty shares his trials using a ānewā planter, and growing
wheat, canola, and sunflowers, cover crops and cows, and flowers and kids outside of Colbert,
WA.
Transcript
Carol
Welcome to On Farm Trials with the PNW Farmers Network, where we explore the many trials that come along with cropping systems innovation in the inland Pacific Northwest. Plenty of questions get asked while farming across this region, and together we are digging into what it’s like to try to answer some of them as producers, researchers and the many other professionals in the field that get things done.
We’re glad you’re here. I’m your host, Carol McFarland. And today we’re talking with Dusty Walsh of TD Walsh Farms outside of Colbert, Washington. Thanks for having me out, Dusty.
Dusty
Yeah, Thanks for coming. Appreciate you taking the time to stop by.
Carol
Awesome. It’s beautiful sitting here next to these flowers. I look forward to hearing a little bit more about those.
In the meantime, would you share a bit about yourself, your farm, and who you farm with?
Dusty
Sure. So I farm with my dad. And then we have 2, or, 1 full time hired guy and part time help through the busy season. And then cover the ground with. My grandfather bought this place in 1950 when we started here and so I guess that’s how we got here.
Carol
Tell me a little bit more about your farming conditions. I know you farm a big range of ground.
Dusty
So the home place here weāre sandy loam soils, 18 inch rainfall just north of Spokane. So even though we have a little bit higher rainfall, we don’t hold it in the dirt. So that June, July rain is super important for wheat yields for us and that we get it or we don’t.
Carol
You said ādirtā, Dusty.
Dusty
Well, sometimes you have to make life a little simpler than it is.
Carol
Soil.
Dusty
Soil? That’s right. No, that’s good.
Carol
And the other places you’re farming?
Dusty
So, the last few years, they’ve picked up a little bit of ground between Reardan and Edwall and which, again, drier through your rotation country typically, and then place down by Teakoa.
It’s more harder than Palouse-type soil. So we’re learning new things about how to farm different places, but it gives us an opportunity to run away from the houses because we’re right on that north edge of urban sprawl here. So that’s been a challenge for us. Looking forward, so excited for new opportunities.
Carol
I mean, I do still remember when I first met you, asked you what you grew and you said you grew houses out here.
Dusty
It’s pretty much the best thing I know.
Carol
So we are sitting here on the edge of the flower garden here. Do you want to talk a little bit about that and maybe that’s not so bad with having some houses.
Dusty
No, it’s good to be clear. No, our location gives us an advantage on that. So my wife and I started a U-pick flower farm here, inspired by something like a gal we worked for in Pullman for Jane Stratton down there.
When we moved home from Pullman, Jane was like, Well, you could do this there too. And my wife was like, Oh, I guess we could. So we started out just growing flowers for her table for my wife’s table. So then it’s grown to be a pretty good little enterprise for us. But there’sā¦it’s not a quarter acre of cut flowers that we primarily do u-pick so people come and get a bucket and flippers and go to town.
So from theā¦we usually open the lastā¦.last part of June and run through frost, which sometimes can be September, the second week of September, all the way to like the third week of October last year or so.
Carol
Well, thanks so much for sharing some of that. You also are a cougar, aren’t you?
Dusty
Yes. Yep. Yep. Have a bachelor’s and master’s from WSU.
So I played the research game for a while. If I wasn’t farming, I’d probably be in research. It was at the time. So it was either come home and farm or stay and do research somewhere or anything. So.
Carol
Well, now I got to ask what your graduate degree was in?
Dusty
Crop science, cropping systems. With Scott Holbert, so yeah.
Carol
I bet that was a good experience.
Dusty
It was.
Carol
Awesome. Well, I’m looking forward to hearing more about how that influences your on farm trials. So let’s get to talking about those. So what experiments and trials do you currently have going on your farm?
Dusty
The story starts back a couple of years earlier. When I started growing sunflowers, one of the neighbors started having success growing some sunflowers up here.
And the advantage we have on sunflowers is that there’s a market really close. And so we’re only five miles from Global Harvest, or they’ll use the sunflowers for birdseed. So we thought that would be a good opportunity for a rotation crop. I guess my degree being in cropping systems was also likeā¦so wheat, there’s spring wheat for the fallow winter, and spring wheat just isn’t always cutting it right.
We got to have something else in rotation to try and diversify these. And we’ve triedā¦used to be lentils way back when. They’re hard to do no till and the weed spectrum is getting harder and harder to control. So lentils weren’t really an option for us anymore. For a lot of years, canola wasn’tā¦didn’t have a viable market here.
My dad grew it when he could sell it through Intermountain back in the nineties and then the market kind of went away. But then with bacteria coming in and making things more stable, you know, canolaās been a good rotation crop and we tried to garbanzo beans for a while because when I was in Pullman, I was like everybody’s growing garbanzo beans.
Why can’t we grow garbanzo beans? But garbanzo beans don’t pay five or $600 or 600 lbs an acre, so we couldn’t grow enough to make those pay. But like, well, the sunflowers seem to be a good viable rotation crop. And so they started growing those up here. And so because of that, and then because we also had another neighbor that had bought a planter and was planting canola with it and being able to cut the seed right back and having really good successful stands, we thought, well, between the canola and the sunflowers, the planter might be a really good option for our area for us to be able to get the sunflowers planted well and use
them on the canola too. And so so yeah, have the planter experiment that’s pretty sold on the in a pretty good deal and then sunflowers that we’ve learned quite a bit trying to grow those and and then we’ve done some cover crop grazing stuff with the cows soā¦
Carol
It sounds like you’ve really been having some fun on the farm lately
Dusty
Got to keep things interesting, right?
Can’t do the same old, same old all the time.
Carol
So tell me what I need to know about a planter. You know, as a soil scientist, I don’t know. They don’t teach us as much about equipment as we should know. So yeah.
Dusty
So you have to know that the biggestā¦all of the money in the equipment research is in corn and soybeans.
Right. And they plant corn with a planter. So I’m pretty sure most of the equipment research has gone into planters right in the Midwest and so then we just get the trickle down of whatever comes out and works for wheat. But the biggest advantage we have is little cingulate seed. It’s a double disk opener with double gauge, which also has really precise depth control and you can meter out your seed spacing more precisely.
And then it also gives you options like we have row cleaners on the front of ours. So doing it in a no till situation, we can move a pretty significant amount of residue and still get the seed in soil and have a clean trench for that seed to come up in.
Carol
Like how much residue are we talking?
Dusty
So I planted spring canola into 100 bushel winter wheat residue at Tekoa this year and with really good success. So there’s a few places where there’s a big chaff pile that it wasn’t ideal, but overall across the whole field it was really good. And so I mean 80 bushel spring wheat stubble, we’ve gone into 100 bushel winter wheat stubble so and you get canola in is canola is pretty picky about coming up and residue.
So to have that kind of well I was really really happy with so yeah.
Carol
That’s exciting.
Is there anything more you want to share about the process of getting a planter? Like how did you choose the one andā¦
Dusty
It was available in the state of Washington, right? No, I know that’s so the planter we ended up with was actually a twin row 20 inch.
So it actually used to have twice as many openers on it. And we modified it to just be on 20 inch because I really wanted to be able to use those road cleaners and manage that residue. And I didn’t think that I couldā¦I couldn’t get row cleaners on the original configuration for it with enough space and so on.
And mostly when I was buying the planter, I was thinking of mostly planting winter canola here north of Spokane and being able to move a little bit of dirt to get to that moisture without having to go as deep and 20 inches in winter. Canola is really good. Sometimes I think closer would be better in spring canola, but we’re making it work.
So it’s mostly it was available on the side of the country so I could actually go look at it before I had to buy it. Right.
Carol
Kick the tires a little bit, right?
Dusty
Yep.
Carol
And is that working for you in the winter canola and getting down to that moisture
Dusty
learning there too. Right. So we did good at getting in the moisture.
I did learn that we needed to have seed firmers on it to be able to push that seed. It’s all all plastic piece and rise in the opener between the double disks and actually the seed drops out in front of it, pushes it down into the moisture and I mean we run them on our single disk for go drill and I should have thought about it, but it didn’t have it didn’t have seed firmers on it.
The first year and then we just ran it. And so I got being as dry as it was last fall, I got a lot of dry dirt falling down in the trench in with the seed, and I didn’t have very good emergence. So some of the winter canola got seeded three times before, but we’re learning we’ll do better this year.
Carol
Well, that’s what it’s about is the learning, right?
Dusty
It was an experiment. Yeah. We learned what we needed to change.
Carol
So it seems like there are sometimes, you do trials on purpose and sometimes they just kind of happen and then you get to learn from the opportunistic trials. Oh, that’s great. Well, thanks and the sunflowers are pretty exciting.
Do you want to talk a little bit more about trying the sunflowers?
Dusty
Well, there’s been a learning curve, too, and it started off with the first year we grew em was almost a complete failure because we learned that we have cut worms. It’ll eat sunflowers and our neighbors hadn’t had trouble with them because they’re all conventional tillage. And we decided I was going to no till all the sunflowers and they’ll be fine.
But the cut worms hide in the residue. And then we also we’re using our industrial or hoe drill. We used the whole drill the first couple of years and your depth wasn’t very precise, so your emergence was much more staggered. And so then the other would be a few plants would come up every day and cut worms would come up every night and eat those plants.
And then the next day a few more plants would come up and the cut worms eat those the next night. So we had this buffet spread out over a week or two for them to annihilate the crop. But so I call that our $30,000 sunflower school year, but we’ve always stuck with it. So yeah, but we’ve made quite a few gains on it and being able to no tilll them what the plan or I mean the first step going to the disk drill helped because then you get better depth and so you get better emergence.
Being able to spray for the bugs, knowing the timing that they were going to be there, that helps have an actual stand. And then the planter probably is a big deal with the sunflowers being able to get the seed spacing correctly because that changes the seed. Basically plant spacing determines head size heads, uniform head size makes them harvests, they’re dried out and harvests consistently and uniformly.
And so if you because you’ve got big heads, they don’t go down as fast. You have little heads they dry down way faster. And so and sunflowers can be a late harvest a crop anyway and we’ve been into the first part of November harvesting them before they’ve had snow piled on top of them. But we try to avoid that.
So if we get a uniform head size, we have the best chance of an early harvest.
Carol
All right. Now I’m curious about what it’s like to run the combine through the sunflowers.
Dusty
Pretty similar. We have a different header that has sunflower patterns on it, but otherwise it’s pretty much the same as wheat or whatever. But yeah, that’s well, that’s, that’s not and you got to wait on that.
Combines do actually have heaters. Nobody in the Northwest knows that, but the heater will actually heat the cabin up in the combine sometimes it doesn’t just have air.
Carol
Yeah. So it sounds like you actually have three different ways that you’re seeding different crops on your plate. Yeah, I heard a hoe drill, a disk drill, and now your new planter.
Dusty
Okay, So. Okay, so we’ve been no till for 20 years. My dad started with the first hoe. No till hoe drill in 2000. 2001. And so. So that was our go to for everything for years and years. And then it wore out, believe it or not, after 20 years. Right. And so and we started growing more canola and sunflower.
So we wanted something with better depth control. So we went to a disk drill and and then thatāsā¦was our we did everything with that for kind of two years. And then I bought the planter because of the sunflower and canola thing. So we just have to just drill in the planter now. So the wheat, wheat all goes into the dust drill and then right now all the canola and sunflowers go in with the planter.
Carol
Great. Thanks for sharing all of that. I’ve got a few more questions for you. So, you know, as you’re trying things, your planter experiments and your sunflowers and you also have some integrated grazing, what questions are you trying to answer with these trials?
Dusty
Can we be more profitable and have better soil health with these or not? Right.
I mean, that’s the big I mean, that’s our big picture is like, can weā¦can we grow crops better long term? Right? And so that’s what the goals are always looking for with all of these. Yeah. So try and you know, we’re kind of on fairly marginal ground in some ways, right? And so there are a lot of pine trees.
So it’s an acidic cleared forest soil and I mean we’re not in or 50 Bushel winter wheat country 50, 55 bushel wheat country, which is not superā¦And that’s and we’re pretty inconsistent because we are dependent on those generations. So it’s like we have lots of years of 30 bushel wheat and then we have a couple of 60 bushel wheat and so it varies a lot.
So being able to weather, trying to even out those storms and do everything we can to conserve moisture in crop so that we’re not as dependent on the June the late rains. But especially know, you only get so much from Mother Nature. But yeah.
Carol
I heard you say even out those storms as part of a soil health goal, I mean, you know, as we talk about yield stability, that’s in space across the landscape as well as time of something that we think and talk about.
Dusty
Yes. No, that would be good. Yep. I’m trying. Yeah. Trying to make things more even because that’s I mean, the banker wants to know return on investment year over year, Right. So that’s important to you that.
Carol
sS when you’re trying stuff, what are you looking at as you you know, you put something in that you’re trying that’s new or, you know, a couple of yearsā¦that’s different.
00;13;56;07 – 00;14;15;17
Unknown
What do you look for?
Dusty
So my master’s degree and my research background wants me to quantify data. Right. And be able to analyze it and make decisions based on that. But the reality is, on the farm, sometimes that’s pretty tough. And when it comes down to harvest and fall and weather is coming, we end up just getting the job done.
And so a lot of those decisions really end up being on visual cues really. I mean, like, does the crop look healthier? Does it not? We willā¦will leave check strips here and there. You know, I mean, if you’re I guess now with the planter, we’ve pretty much gone well, we’ll just plant all the acres with the planter because it’s actually really nice having two things, putting seed in the ground at once because you can be seeding spring wheat and canola and get it all done.
So we’re not as good about the actual quantifying statistical data as I would like to be given my background, but it just becomes harder practically to get it done. So and then we do have a yield monitor in the combine. So theoretically we have that data, but it doesn’t always you always pick it out.
Carol
and you calibrate your yield monitor at the beginning of every season, right?
Dusty
Yeah, at the beginning of the season, but not like on every field like this. They, you’re supposed to and then, I don’t know, we have, we farm a lot of small fields up here, right? So there’s a lot of little pieces and a lot of moving and there’s not very many good places to do larger scale, measurable trials.
So that’s the challenge for me personally here, because I’d like to find places where it makes sense to try these things out. But if you’reā¦you only have a 20 acre field, it’s hard to get all the it’s not worth changing stuff up in the middle of it, right? You just have to get it done and move on to the next one.
Carol
So then when you’re making comparisons, when you’re trying stuff, how does that how does that look? Is that more of a year to year thing? Do you just kind of like peek over the fence, see how your neighbors do in? What does that look like?
Dusty
We don’t have that many neighbors right next to us. We’re all on the other side of some tree line, and they all do too many different things.
So it’s hard to compare to neighbors. I think we as probably as a lot of it ās year over year or when we do have, I guess, a lot of things that we try, we’ll end up trying on like, say, half the acres, right, so that we can compare one half to the other and the other. Our soils, even even here being on clay or I mean sandy loam soils, our soils do vary quite a bit from place to place.
And so that makes it hard to get really good comparisons.
Carol
Variability across the landscape in eastern Washington. I know that’s not a thing.
Dusty
Never. I don’t it’s not like the not like your research plots are everā¦they’re always representative of every acre in eastern Washington. Right. They only go on even soil.
Carol
Yes. They they set aside a special portion of the pollution and made it very homogenous so that the research trails could get.
No, that’s what blocking is for, Dusty.
Dusty
You know, I don’t do very much replicated block trials.
Carol
So, no, that’s okay. You know, I do have a question for you, though. I mean, if if you did have a bit more bandwidth, you know, using what you learned in a research context, like how what would you like to see?
Do you think that would be like kind of accessible on the farm? Like if you did have a bit more time and bandwidth, like what would you do?
Dusty
I mean, I think I mean like larger ish, like strip trials. With that you can collect data with a yield monitor or probably, or would probably be realistic or if you had some way to weigh the strips, if that’s more accurate than yield monitor or I think that scale is probably doable.
If you had a little more bandwidth, how do you define how much bandwidth it takes? So I don’t
Carol
Yeah, isnāt that the question of the hour? Would yield be the main metric you would look for or would there be any other like maybe soil properties or?
Dusty
Yeah, I talk about yield like, like conventional and I’m like a dirt farmer right?
But, you know, soil health is important too. But I do think that you’ll see soil health reflected in yields, right? I mean, that would be-that’s part of the goal, too.
Carol
Well, that’s the yield stability piece. And, you know, being able to kind of Yeah, even things out of it.
Dusty
But I mean, I think you can look you know, you could look at building soil, organic matter and those kinds of things too.
And you could see I mean, early, early plant health, I think is actually a pretty good indicator of soil health. I think I learned last year with my winter canola, that seeding winter canola into marginal conditions is also an indicator of soil health. And it’s like the places where I had to seed the canola three times or the same places that everything struggles, right?
Whereas the places that are generally fairly healthy, fairly good, they made it the first try. So winter canola seems to be a pretty good indicator.
Carol
Yeah. There are some other parts of eastern Washington I drove through that kind of looked like the winter canola was like a big giant biomass of where soil moisture is retained.
Dusty
Yeah, no, I did mine right on the highway this year.
So that was perfect.
Carol
So everybody could watch it.
Dusty
Yeah, I got to drive by it every day.
Carol
Oh, that’s the best place to do experiments.
So do you want to talk a little bit more about some of your end of year decision making for a trial? And, you know, when you get to the end of the year and maybe you look at the yield monitor, you know how the how it looks like the the crop performed over the year, how do you decide if you’re going to do it again next year or do something different?
Dusty
Well, I guess soā¦.Dad and I would sit down and we’d look at yields and where things have been. Probably get a pretty good feel of it when you’re doing your combine harvesting stuff of how things are going. And we do regular soil tests to not that it I don’t know that I can think of specific examples where we’ve seen results in the soil tests, but we do have them.
The more on the and then you weigh the difference of how much hassle it was versus how much benefit you thought you saw out of it. Right. And so and not this year. Last year we did with our fertility, we added quite a bit. We did some more humic acid type stuff and added. So I was – I was up at five thirty, when we were doing our top dress spring fertilizer application.
I was up at 5:30 mixing batches to try and get all the stuff we wanted in there from all the different totes and everything figured out for what we were trying. And I think we saw our results on that. But what we decided this year is that mixing all the things was too much of a pain. So we kind of split it down to what we could get more easily pre blended.
And then we still what we did feel was worthwhile was splitting up our foliar fertilizer applications here is part of our our sandier soil doesn’t have the carrying capacity for water or nitrogen for a long term. Right. So when we’re frontloading that winter wheat trying to re we can’t put it on in the fall because we can’t hold it over the winter and so we just well we’ll put it all on first thing in the spring.
It’s like, well we’re still probably overloading the soil then too and starving the wheat later on. And so being able to split up that foliar I think made a big difference last year. This year we scrapped our last foliar application because it hasn’t rained in a month and we’re like, I don’t think it’s going to make much difference at this point.
So but so those decisions at the end is the, the parts that are more practical and what we can do and get things done on time still versus and the benefit versus how much of a hassle it can be, how much margin we have to do things.
Carol
Sounds like there’s a lot more to the return on investment for these trials than just the dollar.
Dusty
There is.
Yeah, right. Yep. Yeah, there is. Time is probably our more limiting factor than money at times. Really.
Carol
So do you want to talk more about that in some of the you know these other return on investment factors on your as you’re trying things because you started talking about that of course in the 5:30 in the morning.
Dusty
We are pretty diversified, right?
I mean we have wheat, canola, sunflowers and cows, hay crops and the flower garden and raising three kids too. And so like all those things are demands on time, right? So trying to figure out and then where we’re farming like the home place here for a while, I think we’re down a little. It’s like I had like 170 landowners to put everything together with all these little houses and stuff.
We’re farming around. So we’re working on paring that down and it’s not that. And yeah, those conversations are not bad. It’s really good to be that face of agriculture to people who move out here, who have no idea. That’s yeah, so that’s- it’s a hard balance right, between how much of that time is worth it because there is return and reward for being able to educate those people.
And most of those interactions have been really positive, but they also take time and it’s a hassle to spend more time turning your combine around a house than it is actually cutting rate. Right? That is one thing that picking up other ground farther away from housing and bigger chunks. It’s amazing how inefficient the little pieces really are. And it’s hard.
It’s a hard balance to come from feeling like we’re a steward of this ground. Right? And even though they built a house on it or break it up into ten acres or whatever, it’s like, well, we still want to be here to serve that- serve to steward that dirt well, right. Show them how it should be taken care of.
I don’t know- The dirt again, sorry!
Carol
Listeners can’t hear the cringe now. Maybe they couldāve!
Dusty
Maybe! I think it was audible that time.
Carol
Sorry about that. No. Yeah, but no, I think that is really important though, that I mean, you really spoke to something powerful though, that being the face of agriculture and the connection to to the land stewardship and-
Dusty
Yeah, so it’s a it’s interesting trying to I mean, we’re trying to I’m trying to prioritize my time and it’s a return on investment thing again, right?
This isn’t really about the experimentation part, but it’s trying to actually do things that are worth my time. And because it’s like, is all the things to do this time with kids or family or whatever, If I’m doing spending too much time turning corners, it’s as simple as that, really. But
Carol
And that’s an important part of your return on investment that that the happy family not to be underestimated. Yeah. And so it’s been interesting trying to have these conversations, people that say, hey, I’m no longer going to take care of this and I don’t really have a good option for what you’re going to have to do, but I guess you’ll have to figure it out. And that’s why there aren’t really very good options up here for people to do with their ground.
Carol
You know, the title, this podcast is called On Farm Trials. There’s a – there’s a there’s a range of different implications there. I think you’re covering some of those, too.
Dusty
So it’ll be interesting to see what people come up with to do with their eight acres to keep it from going to weeds. Right? There’s a good experiment there. Yeah.
Carol
No, I hear you could be farming around like giant rocks, though, instead. Yeah, there’s, there’s other, there’s all kinds of stuff people farm around in this part of the world.
Dusty
The problem is, on a breezy day, if you spray beside a rock, you’re not going to kill their petunias. And they don’t. The rock doesn’t call you and say, What are you doing?
Are you poisoning me?
Carol
Oh, yeah.
Dusty
And it’s like, No, no, we’re not. We’re being responsible for that.
Carol
Well, I mean, I think from what I’m hearing, you really are thinking a lot about your land management. It’s great that for people to really see that in practice, but making sure that that works out for for your farm. Because, you know, if it does, nobody any good for you all to go broke either, right?
Dusty
No. Right. Yeah. You keep doing that. That’s back to the return on the return on investment for the practices piece to that. And I’ve had a lot of conversations too about how much long term work that we put into the ground that you don’t have anything like maybe we have a three year lease on it, maybe we have a five year lease on it, maybe it’s going to be in houses next year, right.
Like it’s hard to put a lot of money and effort into a long term investment in the ground. It’s that uncertain. So we’ve struggled with that too. Over the years.
Carol
Where do you go to learn more about a topic that you want to try?
Dusty
Well, I am on the board for PDSA, so of course PDSA conference and is a good place.
And so yes, and the content is good. The people there and the conversations will happen after and between are probably equally valuable though, as the actual presentations, but you have to have some kind of catalyst to get everybody there, right? So that’s a good one. Talking to neighbors, other farming friends, other places. And I have a friend in Iowa who farms corn and soybeans, but there’s things that they do that I, I call and ask him questions all the time, especially about the planter.
Since we’ve got the planter, I’ve had to call him a lot. But there’s other things, too, where they’re doing cover crops or even other less conventional fertilizer methods and stuff like that that I’ve been able to talk to him about. It’s really interesting to see how well they do that there. But what pieces ā¦ what pieces could we apply and usually just write it off of as-
It rains in the summer there. So it makes all the difference that.
Carol
Yeah, there’s a lot of practices. It’s easy to put in that category, but I guess hopefully what we can capture as part of this work here with a podcast is is how we are working collectively to figure out how to translate some of those things they’re doing.
Dusty
There has to be some of the same I mean, we’re all growing plants. Some of the principles have to apply. We’re all using soil to grow plants, right? And we’re all interested in that soil health piece no matter where we’re farming and no matter what your rainfall is.
Carol
Well, in really just the variability across where we grow wheat as a core crop in our region is remarkable.
So I mean, I think there’s, you know, what works for one farm, I mean, ten miles away isn’t going to work for it. I mean, sure, between just the spread of the land you farm, you say that things are working some places and not others because of such high variability.
Dusty
Even here at home we have the sand, your soil around the house and the farm here.
And then we farm. They’ll have the farms up in the hills over there and the soil is completely different and it’s like ā¦been trying to farm it the same way. But I’m wondering if there’s places where that’s not actually serving me the best, right? There’s ways that soil should be farmed differently than this. So.
Carol
So could you it sounds like you might have talked about this potentially already, but maybe there’s a different one, but that you’d like to share.
But could you talk a little bit about the most memorable time that you experienced unintended consequences on a trial?
Dusty
I mean, the sunflower failure comes to mind first, right? That’s yeah, that becomes the biggest I mean unintended consequences are usually negative or so or at least the ones that stick with you. So the cover crop grazing thing has really intrigued me, right?
Because we’re short on I mean, so we raise hay, but we have had years when we end up dry where we feed like seven months out of the year and that takes a big bite out of profits, right, to feed hay. And so trying to figure out how to extend our grazing season. And then there’s also a lot of research in that the grazing and cover crops helps build your soil health and stimulate that soil biology and all of that.
And so we’ve tried to look for places we can do that. I picked up a piece of ground just right across the highway last year that we were able to seed a couple of 30 acre patches to cover crop and then run the cows on it. And then the rest of the field was all it was conventional followed, which is unusual for us in a no till situation.
But stepping into a new piece of ground, we had extreme measures had to be taken. Right. So it will be really interesting to see this year how that if we can see the yield difference because with the no rain last fall, there was certainly an emergence timing difference in where we had grazed it. It definitely used the moisture like we have not been able to see the reports of the cover crop ground staying wetter.
We still, when we have cover cropped and grazed, we’ve used our moisture every time so far. So I’d like to think that we would not do that right. I mean, I understand the idea of having a canopy and all of the, holding the moisture and cycling the water, but I haven’t been able to do it yet, so I don’t know.
But at least if we’re grazing it, then we get a benefit, you know, or at least using that using that moisture for for good, not just letting it go away. So it’ll be interesting to see this year what the yield is based on how the wheat came out- came out of the ground last fall. And then it’ll also be interesting in the future to see if we can see any other benefits besides just that one fall moisture thing, right?
Because like maybe having the cows on the ground is good for it in the long term, right? So solving it, so that’ll be a good one. And then we have another- we have another spot. We’re working with a neighbor who’s putting in cover crop this year to put our cows on. So we’ll see how that goes. Oh, I’ll turn it over there.
The one that really worked, the Sorghum Sudan grass pretty much took over. It had it was six different species. There were some broad leavves and stuff in there, some kelpies and some other little fava beans and stuff. Yeah, it was so it was the one that really did well was a later seeded warm season mix. And I wanted that because I knew I was going into wheat and I figured the warm season grasses would frost out if I didn’t get them killed some other way.
So that’s why we did that. And that one was really successful as far as I think we ran 30 cows on that for five weeks or something on 30 acres. That was- I was really happy with that. Our cool season mixes did not do well last year. We tried a little bit here behind the house, but that oats and some other things in it that were more cool season and they just didn’t produce the forage value.
You couldn’t run the cows on aitvery long so well part of the early season growth and stuff when it’s not hot soā¦
Carol
Well maybe, I don’t know, are you going to replicate that in time?
Dusty
We did ask Chris who’s planning to cover crop for us too that we’re going to run the cows on to definitely have the sorghum Sudan in there and a little bit of millet and some of the things that we saw work in his mix.
I think his mix is more diverse overall because he’s adding those things to his mix that he’s done before. So yeah, so yeah.
Carol
Great. Well, like I said, let’s do a little bit more lightning round style. What’s, what’s the most annoying thing about trying stuff on your farm?
Dusty
Logistics, figuring out how to do it, and having to stop and change something in the middle of like your seeding flow or your spraying flow or whatever, right?
Or having to mix a partial tank or something. It’s just it’s we’re driven to be on forā¦being timely, right on everything. And so it always feels like you’re pushed for time to do the things to change it up.
Carol
That’s worth it, though, right?
Dusty
Yeah, Yeah. The other most annoying thing is keeping track of what you did.
Carol
Do you have any tricks for that?
Dusty
No, I fail at that every year.
Carol
Okay, well, maybe. I’m sure you just made a few people feel better.
Dusty
That’s right. I’m hoping maybe I’ll listen to the podcast later and get some ideas for that from other people, right?
Carol
I hope so. It’s definitely on the list of goals. Awesome. What’s the most fun thing about being a farmer?
Dusty
Mmmm…I think doing it with family is really fun.
I have three kids, two girls, 11, eight, and the boy is three, and they love the farm. And it’s really it’s been a really good segue to have the flower farm because it has a lot of hands on stuff that they can really start doing early. But then they like I mean, tractors are everybody’s favorite and we go check, check fields or look for calves in the spring when they’re coming in and just being able to do all the things with the family is really cool.
That’s probably the most fun part. I don’t think that a lot of jobs offer that much family integration, so not that that doesn’t mean- everything is a two sided coin, right? So it takes time, but it’s good.
Carol
That return on investment.
Dusty
It is! It’s a return on investment piece. Yes.
Carol
Awesome. Well, on that note, is there someone you would like to nominate to be on the podcast?
Dusty
Well, you can find out what’s in Chris’s cover crop mix if you go talk to Chris.
Carol
Awesome. Iād love to do that. I hear he’s got some micro rising stuff that he’sā¦
Dusty
He plays with soil stuff, too. You have to see how much he wants to tell you about. Yeah. He also started me on the planter deal
Carol
Deal. So. Excellent. Well, I’ve had a couple of good conversations with him before. I make sure to hit him up. Thank you so much for being on the podcast today. Dusty, it’s always a pleasure to visit with you.
Dusty
Yeah, thanks for coming out.
Carol
As always, a big thank you to our guests today for sharing their wealth of knowledge and experience with us.
This podcast is produced by the PNW Farmers Network Team with Music Credit to Carlos Flores. The views expressed in this podcast are those of the speakers alone and do not represent that of the PNW Farmers Network or any associated agencies. Please remember that experimental results will vary and listeners are encouraged to try things at home. Until next time.
Happy Trails.
Thank you for joining us for the On Farm Trials podcast with the PNW Farmers Network. If you like what you heard, please support this work by sharing rating and reviewing and do consider joining us as a guest or nominating a friend who is trying things on their farm. We look forward to hearing from you.